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Tech Trends 2016: An Overview

For the seventh year in a row, Deloitte Consulting LLP identifies and examines a set of technology trends that are likely to influence enterprise IT in the not-too-distant future.

In a business climate driven by powerful digital forces, disruption, and rapid-fire innovation, every company is now a technology company. Whereas technology was traditionally confined largely to operations and execution, its digital expression now informs all aspects of business, from ideation to delivery. We witness daily how it drives product design, upends venerable business models, and rewires competition.

The ascendance of exponential technologies has occurred within a turbulent context. Globalization is driving borderless growth across established and emerging markets. Barriers to entry are being lowered, if not demolished. In this climate, new entrants—focused on niches, specific functions, and overlooked domains­—can make meaningful inroads on a global stage traditionally dominated by the world’s biggest players.

Meanwhile, customers are demanding evolved methods of engagement that are personalized, contextual, and tailored for individual usability and utility. Likewise, the very nature of employment is evolving as new skill sets become bargaining chips. Talent scarcity complicates efforts to rethink operating and delivery models across functions and domains.

To help make sense of it all, Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2016report is an annual examination of trends likely to disrupt businesses in the next 18–24 months. Watch for in-depth stories on each trend in Deloitte Insights in CIO Journal in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, here’s an overview of the tech trends for 2016:

Right-speed IT. Many IT organizations are progressing beyond the traditional single-speed delivery models that work well for high-torque enterprise operations but not for high-speed innovation. While some do have needs at both ends of the speed spectrum, they often find that bridging the gap between the two is difficult. A growing number of CIOs are building capabilities that link the two edge points or operate along the continuum, with targeted investments in process, technology, and talent to reengineer the business of IT, enabling delivery at the right speed for the business.

Augmented and virtual reality go to work. The future of mobile is tilting increasingly toward wearables, especially as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) solutions hit the market. Long the objects of sci-fi fascination, the looming potential of AR and VR technologies lies in the enterprise with capabilities that could potentially reshape business processes, or fundamentally recast customer experiences. While the consumer world waits for the dominant AR and VR players to emerge, the enterprise can fast-track adoption—and begin the process of fundamentally reimagining how work gets done.

Internet of Things: From sensing to doing. Increasingly, forward-thinking organizations are focusing their Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives less on underlying sensors, devices, and “smart” things, and more on developing bold approaches for managing data, leveraging “brownfield” IoT infrastructure, and developing new business models. Meanwhile, others are developing human-impact IoT use cases for boosting food production, cutting carbon emissions, and transforming health services. What impact will IoT have on your business and on the people around you? Rapid prototyping can help you find out.

Reimagining core systems. Core systems that drive back, mid, and front offices are often decades old, comprising everything from the custom systems built to run the financial services industry in the 1970s to the ERP re-engineering wave of the 1990s. Today, many roads to digital innovation lead through these “heart-of-the-business” applications. For this reason, organizations are now developing strategies for re-imagining their core systems that involve replatforming, modernizing, and revitalizing them. Transforming the bedrock of the IT footprint to be agile, intuitive, and responsive can help meet business needs today, while laying the foundation for tomorrow.

Autonomic platforms. IT may soon become a self-managing service provider without technical limitations of capacity, performance, and scale. By adopting a “build once, deploy anywhere” approach, retooled IT workforces—working with new architectures built upon virtualized assets, containers, and advanced management and monitoring tools—could seamlessly move workloads among traditional on-premise stacks, private cloud platforms, and public cloud services.

Blockchain: Democratized trust. Trust is a foundational element of business. Yet maintaining it—particularly throughout a global economy that is becoming increasingly digital—is expensive, time-consuming, and, in many cases, inefficient. Some organizations are exploring how blockchain, the backbone behind bitcoin, might provide a viable alternative to the current procedural, organizational, and technological infrastructure required to create institutionalized trust. Though these exploratory efforts are still nascent, the payoff could be profound. Just as the Internet reinvented communication, blockchain may similarly disrupt transactions, contracts, and trust—the underpinnings of business, government, and society.

Industrialized analytics. Data is a foundational component of digital transformation. Yet, few organizations have invested in the dedicated talent, platforms, and processes needed to turn information into insights. To realize data’s full potential, some businesses are adopting new governance approaches, multitiered data usage and management models, and innovative delivery methods to enable repeatable results and scale. Indeed, they are treating data analysis as a strategic discipline and investing in industrial-grade analytics.

Social impact of exponential technologies. As strategic discussions increasingly focus on how business can evolve and capitalize on new innovation, it is important to recognize the enhanced role companies should play in the responsible use of disruptive technologies. Their challenge will be finding ways to design and architect models for driving transformative change and positive social impact—both for philanthropic good and commercial purposes. Harnessing exponentials for social impact can help build markets, drive adoption, and light a powerful beacon for attracting and retaining top talent. Beyond that, organizations should consider the ethics and morality of applying exponential technologies, over and above traditional risk concerns of security, privacy, regulatory, compliance, safety, and quality.

Finally, as in last year’s report, we included a “cyber implications” section discussing cyber security and data privacy considerations for each trend. Security, resilience, and vigilance are strategic disciplines, not simply compliance activities that allow organizations to anchor investments in understanding and managing acceptable risk.

Related Deloitte Insights

Forward-thinking organizations approach disruptive change strategically. Instead of launching separate, domain-specific initiatives, they approach exploration, use cases, and deployment holistically, focusing on how multiple disruptive technologies can work together to drive meaningful and measurable impact across the enterprise. Eight trends are likely to emerge in the next year or two.

Purdue University’s Tomas Diaz de la Rubia, executive director of the university’s Discovery Park, sees transportation driving the innovation surrounding energy storage alternatives. Discovery Park is an open laboratory for interdisciplinary collaboration focused on the grand challenges of global health and those that lie at the nexus of sustainable energy, world food supply, water and the environment.

Exponential technological progress in nanotechnology, 3-D printing, synthetic biology, and genomics is poised to revolutionize the way health care practitioners diagnose, monitor, and treat disease. Many forward-thinking IT and business leaders are exploring and experimenting with these emerging tools and approaches today to better understand their impact.

Editors Choice

CIOs with a bold vision can transform IT operations with emerging technologies and demonstrate to other leaders how to do the same across the enterprise, says Bill Briggs, CTO of Deloitte Consulting LLP. By providing business context that can help their peers understand and evaluate technology’s potential, CIOs can help drive enterprisewide business transformation.

Incoming CIOs may face a raft of decisions about technology projects, business initiatives, and hiring or promoting talent, but the first 100 days of a new CIO’s tenure are a time for learning about and evaluating the business, IT function, talent, and culture. Long- and short-term strategic IT plans built on this solid foundation of knowledge can help new CIOs succeed, according to a recent analysis of data from Deloitte’s CIO Transition Lab.

CIOs transitioning into new IT leadership roles often encounter different opportunities and challenges depending on whether they are internal hires from within the IT team or outside the IT function, external hires, or are leading a team through an M&A or divestiture.

About Deloitte Insights

Deloitte Insights for CIOs couples broad business insights with deep technical knowledge to help executives drive business and technology strategy, support business transformation, and enhance growth and productivity. Through fact-based research, technology perspectives and analyses, case studies and more, Deloitte Insights for CIOs informs the essential conversations in global, technology-led organizations. Learn more